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Ted Gioia
The Birth and Death of the Cool
Speck Press
www.speckpress.com
By George W.Harris

Ted Gioia has written a number of classic books on jazz that belong in
everyone’s library. His History of Jazz and West Coast Jazz are two
that I refer to endlessly, and his style of writing is both informative
and clever. His latest book is a bit of a variation, as it doesn’t go
into a style of music as much as a lifestyle that a genre conveyed,
namely the Cool School, which reached its apotheosis in the mid to late
50s.

Gioia goes from Bix Beiderbecke to Lester Young (who actually coined
the phrase “cool”) to Miles Davis to even Bugs Bunny to show how “cool”
became so ubiquitous that it eventually became meaningless, and even
worse, a marketing product. Gioia brings forth the thesis that “cool”
has become “uncool” in the angst and emotional 21st century, but at a
cost, for as Gioia states, we’ve lost our cool. Gioia’s conversational
and informative style makes the pages fly by as a Chet Baker solo.